Conversion Lessons From Acquiring 1 Million+ Customers

Nehal K: Hi, this is Nehal from ‘Ad Tips for Ad Pros’, and today we have my good friend, Andrew Lermsider, and he’s the former CMO of Q-Link Wireless, and the reason I brought him on is because he’s been able to generate over $600 million for himself and other clients that he’s worked with primarily based off of funnel conversion and scaling companies based off of data. A lot of people, when they come into the podcast or even when they’re growing their own businesses, there’s so many different variables and elements in optimizing and scaling a paid advertising campaign and the reason Andrew is on today is because he was talking about how he was able to generate a million unique customers for one of the businesses he’s working with, and then he’s also gonna share some of the strategy on how 1% optimization was critical for him to scale from just a few hundred units a day and a few hundred customers a day all the way up to 5,000+ per day. So, we’re gonna get into all of that, but first of all, thank you so much for doing this, Andrew.
Andrew L: Yeah, man. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. I know this is something we’ve talked about doing, so excited to share some good and helpful information to your audience.
Nehal K: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. So, if you can give a background of just what is it that you do, because the scope of how you’re involved in companies, from an actual operation operational standpoint and mentorship coaching standpoint, it’s pretty vast. What is it that you think your core skill set is?
Andrew L: I am really good at understanding how to get an offer to convert and really understanding sort of where those conversion break points are within the funnel and within someone’s business. So, whether it’s a new business starting out or a more established business … Typically on my consulting side, I’m working with businesses that are doing more like seven/eight/nine figures in revenue, but the mentorship side, small businesses. They don’t understand where the points are that they need to focus to kinda be able to scale their business.
Nehal K: Why do you think you’re able to see what the average business owner misses?
Andrew L: Well, first of all, I’ve been doing this since 2001, so I’ve been forced, not because I was looking for it. I’ve been forced to be good at conversion optimization. Many years ago, no one spoke about conversion optimization; it was just something we did, and then there became this fancy term about it, but that’s how we survived and that’s how we really thrived.
Nehal K: Gotcha, and I know there’s a lot of focus … In the industry overall, there’s a lot of focus on just traffic or there’s a lot of focus on funnel hacking, which is code for just looking at other people’s stuff and copying it or learning from it or using it for modeling, whatever the case is. What is the difference, from your perspective, do you think, when it comes to looking at funnels and scaling them or overall just sales processes, whether it’s online or offline? Why do you think that you’re able to look at things a little bit differently? Because the average entrepreneur, the average marketer, hasn’t generated $600 million in revenue or millions of customers. Before we get into working through different businesses that you’ve been involved with, I just want to understand, from your standpoint, what’s the difference? Because there has to be some magic here.
Andrew L: They do too much. They’re trying to do everything, and you and I have spoke just spoke about it.
Nehal K: Yeah.
Andrew L: That book, ‘The ONE Thing’. It’s focusing on one thing and getting that one thing working really, really well, and when I say, let’s say in the conversion optimization process, it’s getting your landing page to convert really well, getting that down and then moving on to the next step in the process and getting that to convert really well. I think what happens is people look at the overall whole and they don’t break down the pieces and it’s really steps, and when you get every step working perfectly and you have the right source … Let’s say you’re in a niche where the traffic is available, so let’s not talk about niches where you can’t get traffic, you can’t find them on Facebook or Google because you’re doing something weird. Let’s talk about general businesses where you can buy traffic on Facebook and Google.
If you get the steps down, you can scale your business, if you get those conversion points working. So, that’s what I focus very hard on. What I look at is: step one, step two, step three. I’m not onto step ten yet and I think most people kinda move past the initial sorta stages of what they need to get working consistently because the ads will come and the traffic will come consistently once you find your target and you find your ads that are working well. It’s up to your website to convert along the way and that can happen consistently and that’s how you grow.
Nehal K: Just before we started talking, what you were mentioning was specifically for a supplement company, on how 1% transformed the whole organization.
Andrew L: Yeah.
Nehal K: So, can you talk a little bit about what is the outcome that you got, and then we’ll start talking about where it all started?
Andrew L: Yeah, I mean … So, the outcome we got is we started our business in the supplement space. We were doing a free trial offer for diet products and different things and we built up a nice little business doing 500 orders a day, but we kinda got stuck and we knew competitors that were doing 6,000/7,000 orders a day, and we finally got an opportunity to work with a giant network to get us the traffic. They were sending about 5,000 orders a day to our competitors. So, we just said, “Run our offer. Run our offer. It looks the same, feels the same.” They ran it and what happened was they sent us 300 sales in an hour and we were like, “Oh my god, this is unbelievable. It’s almost more sales than we do for the entire day.” We called them up after the hour and we thought we did great and they said, “Sorry, your conversions weren’t good enough. You were at 12%. You needed to be at 12.5%.” They said the numbers for the affiliates, which is in EPC, the earnings per click, didn’t back out and they don’t want to run your offer and they said goodbye and we were like, “What the hell?”
What I mean, literally, Nehal, we copied our competitor’s sites, everything, the look, the feel, except the brand was different. We knew we did all the pieces right, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Well, when we finally did figure out what was wrong, we went from 500 orders a day, about three months later, we got to about 8,000 orders a day and the difference was going from 12% conversions, we got the 13% and that made us the number one people in the industry.
Nehal K: So, if we could take one step back, because even getting to 12% is a phenomenal conversion rate. What was the average order value? Is this straight to trial? What was that like? For people who aren’t doing 500 orders a day, to them that’s the dream right now, and so when …
Andrew L: Right.
Nehal K: When they hear, “Man, life is really tough. We’re stuck at 500.” They would love to be in that position, so how did you even get to that point?
Andrew L: Well, first of all, in this business when we did that, and this was a different business that we had a time, it was all affiliate based marketing, so it was all free trials. They were pre-filtered traffic that the affiliates were sending to us through some sort of a jump page or a blog page so that the person was sort of pre-framed already about the product and then they came to our page and they put in their information and then they signed up for a trial for the product. So, certainly an easier type of sell from the standpoint of the commitment level was very low. They only had to put it in a small dollar amount to get the product sent to their door, so when we talk about those high types of conversions in a normal e-commerce business, no, you can’t get that. So, maybe you’re not fighting for one percent; maybe in an e-commerce business, you’re fighting from 2% to 2.5%. That’s still a 25% increase in your business and that could be the difference of your ad campaigns being financially successful and producing an ROI or not.
Nehal K: We’re seeing the same thing right now with manual bidding. We’re seeing it as soon as you have delivery working for your campaigns at a consistent level, and it’s the same thing, CPCs at $2 versus $1.50, or click to sales rates from 2% to 2.5%. We’re seeing exactly that for one of our clients. So just to get to that point, what you were doing is you were already looking at other types of pages that were from free trial offers that were …
Andrew L: Absolutely. Yeah.
Nehal K: I think there’s a lot of ego that goes into that because some people will say, “I don’t want to copy my competitors or it’s not ethical or I’m better than them. I want to innovate instead of just using what already exists.” What do you have to say to them?
Andrew L: Okay, well first off, why reinvent the wheel? It’s insane, right? So, to me, in any industry I get into, no matter what, if I’ve never been in it before, I absolutely do my research to see who are the number one guys that are spending money and driving traffic? Not guys that are driving organic traffic. Guys that are paying for advertising and continue to pay for advertising, and then I look and I try to reverse engineer as much as I can and learn from them. They’ve already spent millions of dollars. They have already figured out what messages the customer wants to hear. Why do I want to try to guess? Create your own look and your own style, but it would be insane, and it’s the amateur thing to do, not to actually dig in and get ideas from your customers. That’s what every smart business does today.
It’s a … Why do you think … Oh, great example: car Manufacturers. When BMW has a new car and they’re testing it around a track and it’s covered with all this special paint because they don’t want anyone to see it. They don’t want their competitors to see it. They don’t want them knowing about the new feature, the new style, the new air dam, whatever it is. Of course they gotta hide that stuff because everyone’s copying everyone on the largest levels. It’s flattering. Look at it this way: it’s a flattering thing. Someday, someone’s gonna copy you.
Nehal K: Right. Got it. So, when you were at this point in the business where you were stuck at 500, what was the actual difference maker when it comes to that conversion? Because 12% is considered relatively high, whether it’s a free trial offer or not. To go from 12 to 13, especially with your approach and how aggressively you guys were testing, I’m sure there was a lot of things that you were testing. How did you know what the missing pieces were to get from 12 to 13?
Andrew L: You know, we … It’s interesting you say the testing thing. So, I’m a firm believer in testing your websites and testing everything all the time because you make changes on your site, you break your site, your developers add some sort of piece of code on there that makes your site heavy and it loads slow, or something changes, so you should be running testing, by the way, every day. Everyone should be doing it on their web properties, checking the file size of their site, the speed that the site loads, using some free tools like Pingdom tools, and then going to Google test my site so they have those
What we found in this business was the website looked great and we were testing it from our office. The problem was our office was in a very high speed environment. We were not testing it from what the real world environment is and what was happening, at the site was loading too slow. While it looked the same and very similar to our competitors and, to be honest with you, better looking than theirs, is the images were too large, the code was a little bit messy, and when we kinda made the page a little bit smaller in file size and the code load a little bit faster, the site loaded faster and what happened was that’s where our conversions went from 12% to 13%. That was literally the difference of everything.
Nehal K: So, what changes in an organization when you go from 500 to 8,000 per day? That’s a significant bump.
Andrew L: At the time, I had a very, very good partner that understands scale and infrastructure and moved extremely vertically integrated in what we did, from … We did customer service in-house, fulfillment in-house, web development in-house. I mean, every single part of the business so we could hold every single piece. So, it wasn’t easy because it was also dealing with manufacturers, that we were now going to them with these large volumes, so now you’re dealing in procurement and projecting what your inventory supplies are gonna be today. Today, I think what’s great is obviously the systems allow you to scale. We built everything ourselves. We didn’t use a Shopify and we don’t use those types of things in some of the other businesses we do. We like to have a little more control, but for the average guy selling online today, he doesn’t have a system issue, which is awesome. That’s really good.
What he’s got is a capital issue, right? It’s typically one part of the scaling thing, a customer service issue is another part of the scaling thing, and then the other part is obviously depending. If you’re selling a physical product, then you’ve got an issue of making sure that you can get your supplies fast enough because you’re gonna blow yourself up. What I do think a lot of times happens is that people blow themselves up. They do get too big for themselves and they aren’t aware and they’re not thinking ahead of what’s gonna happen if they did jump from 50 sales a day to 500 a day and what really is that impact? So, sometimes you have to take it a little bit slower and then really try to sit and think, “What’s gonna happen if I do that much? What’s gonna get affected? What other teams people do I need to help me to grow?”
And don’t just grow because, “I gotta grow, I gotta grow, I gotta do it because the opportunities here.” I’m a firm believer you gotta catch it when it goes because it’s hard if you turn it down, but just be aware if you’re starting to catch that trend and things are starting to move up, you start really preparing and trying to prepare ahead of time as much as possible so you don’t blow up.
Nehal K: So, the people listening would love to have the problems you guys had. It’s new challenges because it helps and supports your growth as an entrepreneur and creates new skills that you’re almost forced to learn.
Andrew L: Yeah.
Nehal K: So for someone who’s getting … Especially … There are so many different types of funnels that we could be talking about and types of businesses. If we were just to focus on e-commerce specifically and people who are already getting sales, whether it’s at breakeven or a little bit of a loss or a little bit of profit, they’re …
Nehal K: … whether it’s a break even or a little bit of a loss or a little bit of profit, if they’re listening to this they’re not happy, they’re not content, even though they might be seeing some growth in their business and things are going well, they are always striving for more.
And so from your standpoint if you’re getting 10-20 sales a day, and you want it 5X, 10X that number, what would be your methodology at a high level when you’re looking at conversion rate optimizations? So, like increase lifetime value or increase average order of values, and of course spend more money.
So, you’re getting 10-20 sales a day and you want to get 200 a day, how would you approach that theoretically in terms of steps to take?
Andrew L: Okay. So, first thing is it’s all like we discussed. It’s all about the data, and the data tells you everything. So, I would make sure you become very very proficient in Google analytics, and you are looking at your numbers inside and looking at them as a whole and seeing where are people going on your website, what products people are going to, and then looking how long people are staying on those pages.
I would pick, let’s say, one or two products to … let’s say, a product page to focus on, and then depending if you’re using Shopify, which is great, you don’t have to worry about the checkout process. But I would certainly look at, let’s say, the homepage, and I would look at a product page and maybe a category page, and then I would set up Hotjar.
Hotjar is a great tool. You can set up a free account to start off, and I think you can do three different tests, and Hotjar does the heatmap testing. It will do a click and scroll testing so that you can then see where are people going on that page. You’d be very surprised sometimes to see where people are clicking and what they’re doing.
It helps to give you a bit of an understanding of, “Where am I losing people?” On top of that, what Hotjar does is they have session recordings. So you can go in and you can actually watch when people come on where they go, what do they do. It’s like standing over someone’s shoulder to be able to watch them.
I look at that and then I get a lot of insight of, “You know what? I wonder if we change the headline here. I wonder if we change the image here. I wonder if we change the copy.” Maybe, you know what? People are clicking this thing because they think it’s a button and it’s not. Maybe it should be a button, or maybe we need to make the button stand out more.
And sometimes there’s just some basic elemental sort of things that are in there that you can change that all of a sudden … Again, those small little pieces, small little tweak here or small little tweak there, it all of a sudden adds up to being able to generate a lot more sales.
That’s a key key thing. You need to know those numbers and really understand them. I literally live with Google analytics on my phone. I have a new business that we’re launching now, and I know the numbers cold. Most people don’t know their numbers cold. I know when someone hits my website, I know my conversion from this page, this page, this page, this page, and I know exactly in 2 seconds that’s my problem page. I know that’s where I need to focus.
If you don’t know that, you don’t know where to focus.
Nehal K: So, what I hear is like the first part of the process is just data collection and awareness.
Andrew L: Yep. Yep.
Nehal K: Because before that, you can’t make any decisions. So you’re not even. Right. You’re not even ready to make any-
Andrew L: Yeah. This isn’t guessing. You don’t need to guess. The data’s there; it’s amazing. Like, you have it all there sitting in Google analytics. It’s screaming at you, telling you where are the places that you could be doing better, and that’s what you need to do.
Nehal K: And I think this is the dilemma with the entrepreneur, with the media buyer, that they have access to all these tools and the data, and it’s so easily or affordable accessible, and that we just don’t take action because it’s so easy.
And so, what would be your recommendation to someone who’s in that state where they might have installed Google analytics … they might have had it on for years, or they have tried Hotjar, or Lucky Orange, or any of the other competitors. Before we move to the next step, just from the data collection standpoint that’s such a simple thing to start, but most people don’t do it. What would be your advice or recommendation to them just to actually start?
Andrew L: So the first thing I would do is I would go in … again, Google analytics is the first thing. You have to go in there, and you don’t have to be an expert but you need to know the basic things, right? I always liked to look. I have the real-time …
There’s a setting inside Google analytics where you can see the real-time people on your site. What’s cool about that is the real time also shows you what pages people are on. If you watch that enough, it’s like anything else. You pick up a pattern, and you watch. You see, “Oh! People go from here. They go to here. And then they kind of just leave.”
If you watch that every day all the time and it’s on your phone … that’s what I’m saying. Put it on your phone, on the app, and go to the real-time traffic thing, you will learn so much and you’ll start to pick up what people are doing.
The next thing that I would do is really going into … I think it’s … it’s not behavior. There’s another section where you can actually see the site pages that … I think it is behavior. You can see the site pages people go to. I go in there and then I look at what the top pages people are going to. Let’s just say the top 10. And I look at it for, let’s say, a week or a two-week period of time. Probably go by a day. But when you look at the data enough, trust me, you can read it off of one day. I can read it off of an hour.
But starting there and looking, you’ll start to get the sense of, “Wow! People really go to this page.” And you can look at the exit rates, the bounce rates of what’s going on. You get a sense of what’s happening to your business, and you can start to feel like, “Oh man, I’m really losing people. As soon as they hit this page, they’re gone.” And that starts to tell the story to you. That then sets you up to say, “You know what? I need to put Hotjar where we can … like I said, we can set up a heatmap test and video testing and clip testing on those specific pages and run and look at three of them at a time.” And then you’ll start to get an idea, “Maybe I need to change this. Maybe I need to change that.” Let the data tell you what to do.
And I will give you one other huge thing and all that that probably trumps everything I’m saying. It’s mobile. It’s all about mobile. It’s mobile first, so put desktop second. Everything you do and everything you’re optimizing for and certainly on this show when we’re talking about Facebook ads and Instagram ads, everything is mobile. You have to reverse your mentality when you’re making changes on your website. Worry about the desktop user secondly, worry about making sure that the experience is right for the mobile user.
Nehal K: And one of the things we talk a lot about in our organization is that, “Are you seeking the truth?” And fundamentally when it comes to data collection, most people don’t want to look at the truth, and we all have it in our lives in different parts of our lives, whether it’s professionally or personally. There’s just truth sitting there right in front of you.
And so do you know what your visitor from your homepage to your product page conversion … click-through rate is? Or do you know what your add-to-cart rate is site wide? Or do you know what the initiate checkout close rate is and the purchase rate? And those are like fundamentals but it’s so easy to ignore that.
So, just want to make sure. So, for people who are listening, easiest thing that you can do while even listening to this, the rest of this interview, you can go and install Google analytics if you haven’t. If you haven’t logged in, now’s the time to do it. If you haven’t installed Hotjar or an equivalent to that, there’s a lot of free trials for a majority of these tools. All you can do is set up the free trial, set up the code, and just even watch the live sessions.
If you’re getting traffic to your site right now, we’ve seen this over and over, especially with e-commerce. We saw conversion rates drop down significantly and we’re stuck on what happened. It was just an issue from the billing address, the shipping address, and the issue was it autofilled some information in the shipping address, and that’s what messed up our conversions. We would have never known unless we were watching and the people on the site.
So, step one: install Google analytics, install Hotjar, and just start watching.
Now that they have that, what’s the next step?
Andrew L: So the next step is there. Once you, let’s say, identified that these are the pages I need to focus on, and you again, because we’ve talked about one thing at a time. I would highly recommend focusing on one page at a time. When you’re doing split testing and everything else, unless you have a ton of traffic, statistically it’s very hard for you to be making multiple changes on multiple pages, so you should focus on one page at a time and really focus hard on that page, make that page work better so that then you can see, “Okay, this is working.”
You almost want to have … Let’s say it was the product page that you know you want to work on, and the checkout page you wanted to work on, and the cart page. I would say the product page first. Leave the cart page unless there’s some glaring thing wrong with it. Leave the checkout page. Don’t mess with those. Mess with that one and really, really focus, optimize and make that better whatever that might be, again: copy, imagery.
What I do a lot of times when I have a page that’s just not working right, I’ll do two things. I’ll do a contest where I’ll get feedback reviews. So there’s a service I used to use called Feedback Army. Feedback Army is gone, but they replaced it with something else. I’ll go in there, and I’ll get reviews from 10 different independent people, and I’ll say, “We’re having a problem on this page. I would like input on what’s wrong, what could we do better, what’s lacking. Whatever it is.” And you will get 10 reviews from independent people that review websites for like 40 bucks, and they will tell you, “Do this, this, this, this, and this.”
So I do that. That’s one of the first steps that I do. And then depending on what your budget is … maybe it’s a page that needs to be redesigned. I usually bring in a copywriter, and I will have the copy rewritten on the page because I believe firmly that copy is everything today, and making sure obviously the images are good on there as well, and then I might look at a redesign on that page.
So I might then go and do a design contest on Designhill or 99designs, and I’ll really try to focus in on that page. And I feel like that makes a huge, huge difference, and now I got all the feedback from these different points, and now I launch a new thing.
So that’s the way I like to do it. That’s my methodology behind. Now if it’s small changes and you’re just trying to split test the headline, then use a split testing tool. Even in Google analytics they have some sort of split testing tool, and you can try small changes like that. But I try to find … there’s probably a bigger problem than just a headline. It’s all great. You read all the stuff that people said: “I changed this headline.” I’m like, “Conversion” … Yeah, it happens. It definitely happens. But it’s probably not what the problem is. There’s probably a little bit more going on to it than that.
And again: mobile. Looking at it on a mobile perspective, not the desktop perspective.
Nehal K: I think one of the seductive nature of testing is that you focus on superficial, high-level or very minute stuff instead of the core issues like fundamental problems, underlying issues with the conversion of a funnel. How do you stay away from not just focusing on a headline test or just like a button color test, and focus on what the real issue is? If we just look at a traditional e-commerce site, and a majority of that traffic is going to a product page. So maybe the four pages that are there … or three pages are your product page, your add-to-cart page, your initiate checkout page, right?
Andrew L: Yep.
Nehal K: With those three pages, how do you actually get to the core fundamental issues instead of, “I just want to test a color. I just want to test one element”?
Andrew L: I mean, listen: you can try to test the headline if it makes you feel happy, and try it and just see if it really makes a difference.
The button testing, just so everyone understands, that’s all a myth. It’s not that it’s a myth, but some people say, “Oh, a red button doesn’t work.” It all depends on context, so what the red button on the site.
One of my clients i just helped, they just sold their company for $30 million and they have red buttons all over their site. So, that’s a farce. It all depends if it makes sense and it fits within the design of the site. So I’m very big, to me, on, “What’s the interface like? What does it feel like for the customers, especially again on the phone where we’re talking about thumb stopping and sliding? Does it feel right and look right? And then, does the design feel professional? And then does the copy and the messaging feel right?”
All of that is tied together. It’s not one little piece, and that’s why I say I typically like to get a designer to come in … go hire a designer on Upwork, go find someone to rewrite the copy on your page. You’ll spend 50 bucks, a hundred bucks. You have to invest in your business to make money. Get the copy back and then see about how you can maybe redesign that page and make it look better. If it’s a product page, redesigning that page and making it better, it’s going to make all your product pages look better.
Nehal K: Right. And so, from what I’m hearing, there’s a big difference between strategy and tactics, right? And so what you’re talking about strategically, how to approach your funnel conversion. And so what you’ve said so far is that first thing is, “I get my data.” Then after that I make sure that I’m looking at what the page … that one page that I actually need to work on.
Once I know that, the thing I’m testing is copy on the page, design on the page, and then getting feedback from other people just so I get different perspectives on tests to run, and bigger tests to run instead of smaller tests.
Is there anything else that really moves the needle? What happens in this situation is you get stuck in small adjustments.
Andrew L: I would absolutely … and this is what we talked about before. I look at my competitors that are doing that really well, and I dissect their product page then, and I look at it and I try to really figure out the details. And then I go, and if I was doing this, I would go and look to see some really smart guys that are out there that provide some great information on best practices to have on my product page.
And then I look and I see, “Oh! Do I have credibility on the page. Yes. Do I have a testimonial? Do I have security? Do I have all the elements that should be on the page?” And that obviously makes you realize, sometimes, like, “Oh wow. I’m missing this key piece. I’m missing this piece. I’m missing that piece.” That becomes super helpful. …
Andrew L: This piece, I’m missing that piece. That becomes super helpful.
Nehal K: Got it. And so, if people are listening to this, they’re going to go in, they’re going to install Google Analytics, and setup Hotjar. Great. Then, they’re going to look at the different pages. And then from there, they’re going to hire the copywriter, graphic designer, run those test, and then go. What happens after that step is usually you lose momentum. None of the tests worked. You lose excitement. The honeymoon phase is done and you’re like well, I gotta go and fix the other fires that I have in my business because they’re fires. They’re more exciting. And so, how do you go back and create a feedback loop and get more consistency in the execution? Because it’s so easy to get excited or get pissed off enough to do something about it. But then, it just all stops and you go back to who you were and do the same things that you were doing.
Andrew L: I look at testing as two things. I like many times when it fails miserably because I know then it was totally off-base. And then it gives me like, okay this is all right. I don’t like when it’s kind of like yeah, they’re pretty close. I kind of like when it’s one way or the other and I’m like, okay I know I can work harder. That’s why I said one page at a time because that’s what happens to entrepreneurs. You do have your businesses to run, and this is hard work.
Conversion optimization is hard work. You have to beat yourself and beat your head against the wall. And you just keep doing it. It’s like your pitch on the phone if you were selling. You keep honing it down. You change a little word, you change a little thing here or there, and it just makes a difference. So the only thing I can say is on that, you have to keep at it. It’s not a myth. It’s real stuff. This is how businesses really grow, and this is what they do. And they test, and they optimize, and they test, and they optimize.
And yeah, you can keep going where it’s too far. Right? There’s a point of diminishing returns, let’s just say. Right? So when that business when we got to 13%. Yeah, could we have gotten to 14%? Sure. It didn’t matter. You know what I mean? I have a business of mine now where I have a 24% opt-in rate on something. It’s great. And I’m sure I can probably squeeze it to 30%, but it’s a little bit … That’s not where I need to focus my attention on. So you gotta make sure you focus your attention on that and keep going on that. If it’s your product page that is not producing the results, you cannot give up.
Nehal K: Right. And one of the things that entrepreneurs and marketers, the trap we all fall in, is the obsession about the outcome instead about the actual activities that get to the outcome. Right?
Andrew L: Yeah.
Nehal K: And so, the activity is I’m going to launch another test on … First of all, I’m going to spend 30 minutes or an hour just analyzing looking at Google Analytics or Hotjar sessions. Or it could be, I’m going to come up with five tests that I could run this week, and then I’m going to implement one of them. And so, if you do those three activities, which is I’m going to study, I’m going to create ideas, and I’m going to implement one, that could be activities that you could be doing weekly, and you get obsessed about that process instead of the outcome. Which is, of course, important, but your energy and your emotions are as much … We don’t normally attach ourselves to something, and you’d much rather be attached to the activity than the outcome. And so, how do you look at the frequency or rotation of test and setting goals for yourself? Because the outcome is, of course, so important, but there’s steps to get there.
Andrew L: I’m really, I’m into it. So for me, it’s very exciting to me. Forgetting about the money on the other side, money’s also super exciting, but it’s very exciting to me. It’s like a math problem. And it’s like when you solve it, it’s like, wow! Look at that! I just got 100 more people to go from this step to this step. That’s so cool. Right? Everyone talks funnels. I got more people to move through my funnel. And when you look at that, try to get excited about that because, again, if those small percent like we spoke about, let’s say you had 10% of the people that went to your product page added it to the cart, let’s just say. If you’ve got that to 11%, it’s not 1%. This is where people, I guess, lose the excitement in conversions. No, that’s 10% more people.
Imagine if you got, let’s say 12%, that’s 20% more people. And if you’re still thinking about it in numbers, think about in numbers like that. Conversions are never 1% and 2%. They’re really, in the end when you multiply it out, I mean it’s different for everything, they’re much larger amounts of numbers. And so if we looked at and said, well I had 200 visitors that came to my site today, and 20 of them went from the product page to the cart page. But now all of a sudden, 24 of them went, that’s a huge difference.
Nehal K: Right.
Andrew L: You know, so that’s the way I try to look at it. I don’t try to look at that single digit number, I actually look at really that end result number. And that end result number gets me very excited because that end-result number’s what actually can really ring the register.
Nehal K: At what point do you say, you know what? This was my one thing for the last 30 days. I’m done. I gotta move on to the next thing. How do you know?
Andrew L: I mean, obviously, every website and everything is different. I don’t know what the effort is that you gave into it. You might have gave a half-ass effort into it, and that’s it. I mean, you gotta look at statistically. Right? What’s the average numbers? And I don’t know whatever the business is, what are the average numbers of people going from a product page to a cart page, and looking at what industry standards are. And if you’re meeting or exceeding those industry standards and you’re trying other things, and it’s just not moving it, you’re probably at that point of diminishing returns.
I had something else we were just recently testing and it was like 80% of the people went to the homepage, went to the next page. That was insane. Right? Could we have gotten 90%? Sure, but that was already an unreasonable number. So you’ve gotta be unreasonable in life, be unreasonable in what you do, but you also have to find that point of like, I tried a bunch of things. Everyone know when they put their energy and effort in. I put my effort in. I think I’ve done good. I did on the copy really well. The design is good. It’s working better. I got it to a better place. Okay. Let me see what’s the next one that I can work on now. Let me see if I can make a difference there.
And like I said, it’s little steps at a time, but when you get each little step down, and then it adds in together, that also becomes your automated cashflow machine. Right? Because it’s just the traffic that you drive comes in, it goes to the site, and the site’s like a conveyor belt. It consistently does what it’s supposed to do. Beside for when your site goes down or little things that happen. It’s just literally a machine. And then it just becomes scaling up the ads and scaling up infrastructure.
Nehal K: And so do you think that it’s possible to delegate conversion optimization on your team? What are your thoughts on that?
Andrew L: You can. You know? I mean, I think depending on the size of the company we’re talking about, they have to. Right? But if you’re a small entrepreneur, that’s very hands-on yourself, I think you need to be an expert in things like that in your business, and certainly, understand it well. And if you are going to delegate it to someone that’s on your team, whether it’s a front-end developer, or designer, or copyright, whatever it is, or it’s someone on your team that just kind of overall runs the business, you need to be involved in that process. Because, again, you have to know everything about your business. You have to be looking in Google Analytics all the time so that you can predict what the moves are.
I think we’ve talked about it, I’m actually really a book by Grant Cardone right now. So, Grant’s obviously a master, master salesperson, and he’s really actually super impressive. And one of the things he talks about is being able to predict the outcome. When I look at traffic on a website, I can predict the outcome because I’m looking at it so much. So much so that let’s say in one of my other business where we were doing very, very big numbers, we would have like 1500 people on a site simultaneously. And I would look at the conversions. We would have up, on charts on the wall, the computer screen showing Google Analytics with live traffic. And I recommend people do that. So they put it up on a screen and you can see the live traffic on your site. It’s a great one because it’s in your face.
I was actually able to notice when things were not working right. Like, say the system slowed down. And I would walk into the CPO and be like, “We have a problem.” And he’d be like, “No we don’t.” I’d be like, “Yes we do.” And because I know, it was like a spidey sense, I was predicting because I saw patterns that were happening of things not working right. And then, he’d say a half an hour later, “Yeah, there was a server that slowed down or a process that slowed down.” I’m like, “I knew it.” So you can’t do that unless you know your data, and you understand it, and you’re watching it. And then, you can become really in a position where you’re predicting where things are and when things are going wrong.
Nehal K: So for people who are listening and they haven’t taken conversion rate optimization seriously, or just like overall energy invested in conversion, are there any tools or education that you’d recommend? Resources that they can check out?
Andrew L: Yeah. So two I would say that are great, Peep Laja, I guess his name is. Or Laja?
Nehal K: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew L: From ConversionXL. I think he does a great job. And I mean, he’s super, super smart and teaches some great things. And then, my buddies over at Traffic & Conversion with DigitalMarketer, Perry, Ryan, and Roland, and their whole team. I mean, those guys are amazing and I think they teach excellent, excellent ways to look at conversion optimizations and have some really good SOP, standard operating procedures.
So I think those guys, if you don’t have a lot of money, you can join like their DM Lab. And I’m not promoting them from the stand of, I believe in what they do. I’ve taken things that they’ve showed me and shown my organization. And I can thoroughly say that there are things that I have learned from them that have taken our businesses from certain levels and brought them to much bigger levels. Those guys know and they have the beat on who else is testing different things. So I just would go to those sources.
Nehal K: Gotcha. If there’s anything in terms of for entrepreneurs when they’re getting started with this process of improving their conversion, most people just focus on traffic or they’ll focus on like let me launch a new product, or let me change my offer. Whatever the case is, conversion usually isn’t like at the highest priority. Just to wrap up, what would be your main advice for people who are getting started with this? Where they know they should be investing time and energy and potentially cash in this process, they just haven’t. So if they’re just getting started, already seeing results from other parts of their business, but conversion hasn’t been the priority, what would your advice be to actually make sure that they’re getting started and doing it right?
Andrew L: I mean, probably going and taking like a little course. Again, it’d be something that Peep offers or one of these other guys, a digital marketer, just to learn the fundamentals. Right, because they’re the fundamentals of conversion optimization. Understanding what it means and, again, really going into Google Analytics and looking at the data. Because if you look at the data in there, it’s going to force yourself to say I need to focus on conversion optimization.
If you ignore that data, and you’re just looking at things like, oh well, my ad is converting. I’m generating some money. And you don’t have the other real back-end data, you’re never going to focus on it, so you have to look at your data. I mean, the data’s everything. Amazon doesn’t grow because Amazon grows based on whims and hopes and prayers. They look at the data and they make very, very educated decisions that are probably very accurate based off of data. You have the data. Look at your data. That’s probably the key thing is, really look at your data. Everyone ignores it. Not everyone. Most entrepreneurs ignore it.
Nehal K: Right. And where can people reach out to you if they want to connect with you if they want to just learn more about what is it that you do? Or potentially-
Andrew L: Yeah, yeah. No. I mean, sorry. You can go to my website, andrew lermsider.com. And then, really you can follow me on Instagram @andrewlermsider. I’m being honest, I go through spurts where I’m posting a lot, and I go through spurts where I’m not. It just depends on where I am. If I’m starting a new business or consulting for too many clients, and I’m just not in the mode of producing content from a personal branding standpoint. So you can follow me there, and I think I have some new stuff that’s going to be coming out soon, so.
Nehal K: Perfect. Well, Andrew thank you so much for coming on, Man. I really appreciate your time.
Andrew L: Of course, Man. Pleasure.
Nehal K: All right. See you guys on the next one.